


And It's Hard for Me to Take a Stand When I Would Take Her Any Way I Can

by JackEPeace



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, F/M, Reincarnation, sorta like soulmates kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 02:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12739260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackEPeace/pseuds/JackEPeace
Summary: “You don’t know me,” Rip tells her.A part of him is tempted to say yet.Another part of him is tempted to say remember me and stay as far away from me as you can anytime our paths cross.-or-5 times Rip finds Sara throughout history and the 1 time she is his Sara.





	And It's Hard for Me to Take a Stand When I Would Take Her Any Way I Can

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plinys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/gifts).



> So this is the first time I've ever written Ripsara and the first time I've written anything for Legends so let's hope for the best, shall we? This story is kinda like a soulmate fic meets the idea of reincarnation meets a completely random idea I had and just ran with it? 
> 
> This is a birthday story for the lovely Jess, who not only insisted I watch Legends but who is also a fabulous, wonderful and amazing person who deserves all the fics and things for her birthday and gets only this because I'm bad at managing my time. Happy Birthday Jess! You are the greatest! 
> 
> Title comes from the song "Neon" by John Mayer

_The world, he knows, is not just random. He’s seen enough of it to understand this, to know the science behind it, the fact. People take it as speculation, as a comfort when the religious opiate wears off and they can say, with wavering certainty, that nothing ever really dies or disappears. It’s just replaced, born again, reused and recycled. Like the atoms and molecules that make up human beings have figured out how to reduce, reuse, and recycle when the human beings themselves have yet to get a handle on the process._

_They think it a possibility, something to_ hope _for truth. That they will never truly die, not really._

_He knows better. He knows that the world, despite how it might look to the outsider, is not random after all. It repeats: the same people, the same places, the same events._

_It’s weird to be in his position, to age normally, to progress through a timeline that isn’t normal at all. He can be anywhere at any time. He’s seen the birth of civilization and the countless times its nearly gone the opposite. The wars, the discovers, the triumphs and the failures and still isn’t entirely sure where he belongs in all of it._

_And in all that he’s seen, he understands the repetition, the patterns. The lessons that are never learned. The people who are born and die and are born again and remember none of it._

_But he remembers._

_He remembers her._

**1**

It will take eleven minutes for the ship to sink.

But Rip isn’t thinking about that just yet.

He’ll have plenty of time to think about it later, when the torpedo strikes and the ship starts to go down and the realization -the memory- that all the people he’s been with for the past five days will likely die and history will hardly remember them in the decades to come. _He_ will hardly remember them. Except for the one who matters, of course.

The one he came to see.

Rip can see her now, glittering in the finery purchased by a well-meaning father, one who wanted his American daughters to travel across the sea and see the world. Europe, he promised them upon boarding, would take their breath away.

Rip has perpetuated this idea, done his best to seem charming and in vogue when he joins Captain Lance and his daughters for dinner in their first-class cabin.

The war has been on for a year now, give or take, long enough for the conflict to start to earn its name: The Great War. Soldiers are shipping out, battles are being planned -all without the knowledge that he has, the inevitability of what will come. These battles that have already been won or lost before they’ve even begun.

But Rip isn’t thinking about that just yet, either.

What he’s thinking about is her, Sara. The girl he won’t be able to save, not here, not in this life.

He knows this, of course. Knows that it’s foolish, ridiculous, that he’s nothing more than a dog chasing its own tail. Rip knows all about inevitability; he knows all about the course of time and how important it is to ensure that it will unfold, slow and easy, the way it’s supposed to.

But still, here he is, in bed with Sara Lance, who will be dead in a few hours.

In this life, at least.

She doesn’t know him, doesn’t find the name Michael strange or unfamiliar when it passes her lips. He’s never really been a fan of the name, even before he had to change it. Here, he thinks, maybe it’s not so bad.

Sara looks like a painting here in this moment, one of the frescos he’s seen being painted on the walls of a cathedral years before this moment. He’s known a Sara, many, who would sneer at that comparison, that would assure him that she’s certainly not art and has no intention of ever being. But this Sara, who is as pretty as a picture, has a personality to match.

Rip winds a lock of her hair around his finger, letting his hand lightly brush against the roundness of her cheek. Her eyes are watching him, tracking his movements, like there’s a part of her that she can’t shut away no matter how dainty she may be in this life.

This very, very brief life.

“I feel like there’s something you aren’t telling me,” Sara says, as though sensing the thoughts in his mind.

The guilt that he feels, knowing what is going to be coming all too soon.

How this moment is stolen for the both of them, though only he has the knowledge of what he’s taking.

Rather than lie, Rip says, “You don’t want to know” and decides to count it as an honest truth.

Sara looks at him, tilting her head slightly so that she’s just out of his reach, her eyes sharp even if the rest of her is not. “Yes, I do,” she tells him, finality in her tone.

Rather than answer, Rip says, “Are you happy?”

It matters here, in this life, in this moment.

With narrowed eyes, Sara says, “For now.” A coy sort of answer that Rip imagines would make the men back in New York swoon over Captain Lance’s daughter.

But it only makes him smile, heavy and far from genuine. “For now,” he repeats.

And then he starts to think about what will come next and how he cannot save her, not in this life.

* * *

 

_He remembers once, what he said about life. The words, the moments before and after, are slightly muddled in his brain, sometimes difficult to place but impossible to forget._

_That history is war and slavery and holding your dead son._

_He remembers all those things and how they felt._

_How it feels to be the one outside of time._

**2**

“You’ve been following me,” Sara says to him when she catches him in the market, trying not to be seen.

How hard he’s trying to avoid her is up for debate.

Here she dresses like the other women: skirts and dresses and flowing fabrics that would keep her from moving easily and gracefully. But here, she still moves like the Sara he’s known before, though she has no knowledge of what her muscles know. A lioness in a pretty dress.

Rip smiles at her, apologetic. He hadn’t meant to interact with her, not this time, not really. He hadn’t been here for her, but Gideon had told him that their paths would cross here if he were to linger just a little after his official business was done and…

And he had been lingering, trying to stay out of sight, to see her and move on.

“Why are you following me?” Sara presses and her eyes flash with annoyance and he knows that he can’t just slip away, not now. The lioness has him pinned and, if he’s being completely honest, it’s what he’d been hoping for when Gideon had told him that he would find her here.

“A coincidence,” Rip tells her, “we happen to be heading in the same direction.”

Sara’s expression doesn’t change. “And what direction is that?”

Rip isn’t entirely sure how to answer that question.

“I didn’t mean to bother you, my lady,” Rip says as gallantly as he can manage, taking a step back from him.

Sara steps forward, closing that distance once more. “You seem familiar,” she tells him. “Like I know you from somewhere.”

The irony, he wants to tell her, is that she does. Only hundreds of years in the future, when she will be the person that he loves enough to try to use these other variations of her as a substitute.

“You don’t know me,” Rip tells her.

A part of him is tempted to say _yet_.

Another part of him is tempted to say _remember me and stay as far away from me as you can anytime our paths cross_.

But he doesn’t say anything on his mind, doesn’t tell her to avoid him, doesn’t make it seem like she has a choice in the matter, like their meeting is anything but purposeful.

“Aren’t you the mysterious one,” Sara says.

A smile. “You have no idea,” Rip tells her.

She doesn’t seem impressed by his efforts to live up to her assessment of him.

Before he leaves, it will Sara who makes the move toward him, who pushes him to the side of one of the thatched inns and kisses him.

Rip will pretend, for the briefest of moments, that he thought about turning his head, that he considered pushing her gently away and going back to the _Wave Rider_.

But he’s too weak to resist the temptation. He kisses her and imagines that she is his Sara.

* * *

 

_Humans, as a general rule, refuse to learn from their mistakes._

_He’d learned all about it, before. Before he had the ability to travel through time, to visit the places in the text books and documents that he was forced to study, to learn, to commit to memory. So that he would be able to protect and preserve the things that had happened already._

_And one thing he learned, without a doubt, was that humans never learned._

_The wars, they were all the same._

_The reasons to kill, to fight, to pillage, they never changed._

_The moments would happen, blips in the span of time, blights in the present timeline and in the lives of the people who lived through them. But when enough time had passed, they would be forgotten, dulled, repeated._

_People would make the same mistakes again, would go to war for all the same reasons and claim that they were original and bold in their thinking._

_He wasn’t much better. In the grand scheme of things, in the timeline that was both linear and simultaneous, he was just another idiot who couldn’t figure out how to learn from his own mistakes._

**3**

Sara, it seems, is very good at dying.  

And history -his own- has taught Rip that he’s very good at one thing: being entirely too late.

It’s not like he hasn’t seen it before. Not like he hasn’t experienced this exact feeling countless times before -with Sara and with Miranda too- but he isn’t sure that he’ll ever get used to it.

Or maybe he has gotten used to it. Maybe that’s why the sight of Sara, this Sara, this person in a year he can’t even remember, in a life he doesn’t care one iota about, makes him angry rather than exhaustibly and insurmountably sad.

Maybe that’s why it’s easier to walk onto the _Wave Rider_ and let his fist connect with the titanium paneling.

“Captain,” Gideon chirps with an inexplicable element of judgement in her computerized tone, “might I remind you that the ship suffers enough external damage without the addition of internal threats.”

Rip scowls -at Gideon, at Sara, at himself, at the ridiculousness of the whole situation- and just barely manages to resist the urge to let his fist hit the wall again.

Once, he knows, eventually, he’ll use these hands to kill Sara.

He’s not the reason that she’s dead now in this unimportant decade, in this unimportant century. But it hurts just the same.

“We should have arrived earlier, Gideon,” Rip hears himself saying, aching hand scrubbing across his face. “We didn’t…I missed her. She’s already gone.”

A pause and then, “I feel inclined to remind you, Captain, that the person in this year is now Miss Lance.” Gideon pauses again. “At least not Miss Lance as you know her.”

“I _know_ that, Gideon,” Rip says tightly, through gritted teeth. And he does, he _does_ know this. But it doesn’t matter, not when it means he missed her anyway. “Just get us out of here.”

“Where shall I set our course?” Gideon asks.

Rip is tempted to tell her to find Sara once more, any incarnation of her, any chance to be near her again.

Instead he mutters something unintelligible but the ship moves anyway and they’re gone and this time there’s no one left to remember -even for a fleeting moment- that they were there at all.

* * *

 

_Human beings imagine themselves to be entirely unique. It’s a source of pride for them, he knows, this fallacy. This completely misguided idea that that they are the first of their kind, wholly original. Special._

_He understands what so many of them do not. That human beings are nothing more than algorithms, a randomly generated series of genetics and choices and sheer luck of the draw that makes them what they are. He understands that nothing is ever random or unique or special._

_Nothing ever occurs only once across the span of time._

_Even her._

**4**

The taste of blood on his teeth and tongue is not an unfamiliar one, though it’s still not one that Rip thinks he will ever get used to. It comes with the territory of always managing to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and being a bumbling idiot on top of even that.

Even still, Rip spits into the dirt and then runs his tongue along his teeth, smearing away the blood left behind. The League does not appreciate his efforts to join up with them, if evidenced in their silent approval of the ass-kicking that is currently being handed to him.

By her, of course.

She’s not Sara here.

Just Ta-er al-Usfar. The bird. Pretty plumage and a song to kill.

Rip wonders if Sara would feel better knowing that certain parts of her life are nothing more than an inevitability. That a century later she would be back in this place, that she would lose herself all over again, that she would belong to them. Or maybe it would only make things worse knowing that sometimes there’s no escaping things.

It hadn’t been the brightest of ideas coming here, Rip understands that now. This might be one of those moments where he can say quite soundly _well you never learn do you, you bloody idiot?_

Across history, he’s found her. Across history, she’s failed to know him at all. Rip feels like there’s a part of him that deserves that. He also knows that he’ll never truly learn, never really stop even when he knows that she’s not his Sara, not really.

The inevitability of their meeting is both a century and moments away.

Rip lifts the weapon in his hand in time to parry a blow from the staff Sara is holding but it drives him backward anyway. He’s not really trained in combat like this, not much good with anything aside from a gun in his hand and a lot of dumb luck. He can see the expression on Sara’s face; it’s one that he knows well. Cat, meet mouse. She’s playing with him, no doubt until her masters of the League tell her otherwise.

Sara swings and this time Rip isn’t so lucky; the staff catches him in the side with a sharp crack and the air rushes out of his lungs in a puff as he drops to the ground. He hears the whistle as the staff swings harmlessly overhead and settles comfortably in Sara’s hand.

There’s a beauty to her that Rip feels cannot begin understated. One that’s impossible to ignore. He tries to remember later if he will appreciate Sara for what she truly is: this machine that the League has made her.

That is, of course, why he wanted her in the first place. He needed someone like her on his team, a well-crafted, well-oiled machine with just enough control to pull back at the right moment.

Rip feels guilty for even thinking of her like that, especially about his Sara, the one that he knows so well. She’s not the machine they made her, the one that he sees now.

The Bird stares down at him, unmoved when Rip lifts his head to meet her eyes. Her eyes, so unchanged when the rest of her is different.

Unable to resist, he says, “It’s me, Sara.”

Her expression doesn’t change. “Who is Sara?”

Even the name is unfamiliar on her tongue, while it fits so comfortably on his.

Rip smirks, shaking his head. Who, indeed.

* * *

 

_Nothing is random. He understands that now. Even the things that seem like the most serendipitous, the most unexpected, are all part of a plan that has already been written. That’s why time, he thinks, is so impossible to change. Even the efforts to change what is fated to happen are written into the plan all along._

_It makes him sad to think about life this way. The inevitability of everything seems to take away the beauty. The optimism. The hope._

_At the same time, it’s strangely comforting, this knowledge. The realization that everything is destiny, already written and fated to happen, makes it easier to carry on, to know that eventually their paths will cross again, and she will know him._

**5**

She saved his life once. Twice. A dozen times. More than that, if Rip is being generous and honest. He can’t count the number of times she’s truly saved him, just by being there, by believing in him.

He knows that she would deny being a hero, a person deserving of that moniker. Rip disagrees, not that it really matters what he thinks.

Sara is standing across the room, entirely unaware of him -as she should be. This, he knows, will be the last time that he’ll see her in a linear timeline before she becomes his Sara.

It’s 1971 and The Doors are playing on the turntable and the air in the college dorm room is thick and fuzzy with the caustic smell of cigarette smoke and the tangy sharpness of the joints being passed from person to person. Everyone here, Rip thinks, seems impossibly young, especially Sara, and it gives him a strange twinge in his heart to see her like this. He knows in future that she was never meant for this life either, that being the college student was never in the cards for her regardless of where and when she lived.

He doesn’t know what will happen to her over the next decade; he doesn’t know the moment that this Sara will die, and his Sara will be born in her place. But Rip knows that this moment is the youngest she will ever be. And that there is nothing he can do to stop the inevitable.

From across the room, Sara’s eyes shift in his direction and their gazes lock. There’s a brief flicker of impulse, something that makes him want to break his own rule and cross the room toward her.

There’s a brief moment where, Rip thinks, recognition might cross her eyes. Where it seems almost as though she knows him.

But the moment passes. Sara doesn’t move toward him. Rip keeps his feet firmly planted.

The party continues, and Rip knows that whatever is to happen to her next is inevitable. That she will die, and he won’t be able to save her, not in his life.

Rip knows that he’ll never truly be able to repay her for how she’s saved him.  

**+1**

When Sara looks at him now, Rip can see so many things in her eyes. Anger; passion; devotion; relief. Recognition.

She knows him here and now. And he is allowed to know her.

This woman in his bed is _his_ Sara.

His present with her is so much better than all the pasts they never managed to spend together.

Rip often debates mentioning these other versions of her, the fact that they have crossed paths over the centuries. He often talks himself out of it. “You know,” he says instead, “I’ve never known anyone quite like you.”

He smiles when Sara’s response is to give him a shove with her elbow. “Don’t go soft on me, Rip,” she tells him.

Rip smirks, staring up the ceiling of his room. “Of course not,” he tells her.


End file.
